Advertisements printed in a newspaper are a well-known means for advertising all kinds of products and services. Frequently, a telephone number is printed in the advertisement to allow potential customers to contact the advertiser. More recently, such advertisements have also started to appear on web pages on the internet.
Classified newspaper advertisements are a conventional means of advertising second hand cars, other goods, some services, job vacancies and the like. Again, a telephone number is normally provided by the advertiser to allow potential customers to contact the advertiser. However, a number of inconveniences are associated with the provision of a telephone number. Firstly, calls can continue to be made long after the advert has served its purpose, wasting the advertiser's time. For example, for a used car advertisement many people may waste the vendor's time even after the car has been sold. Furthermore, such telephone calls may be made at inconvenient times when the advertiser would prefer not to be disturbed, such as late at night.
NL94/01717 describes a system for connecting a customer to an advertiser anonymously. The caller calls into a telecommunications device including a switch, the device checks to see whether the call is to be transmitted to the advertiser, the device rings the advertiser, who can accept the call or hang up. If the advertiser does not hang up, the caller is anonymously connected to the advertiser. The system works as a stand-alone box, accessed by DTMF tones.
The advertiser may dial the device, on the same number used to respond to adverts, and then the DTMF tones produced by subsequent dialled digits can be detected and used to reset options. For example, the advertiser can dial 0 * followed by a PIN code to change options, for example to prevent further calls being routed to the advertiser.
The system can work with one telephone number per advertiser, or alternatively the switch can detect an expansion code between say 00 and 99 to select one of a hundred advertisers all on the same telephone number.
In this way, the system can anonymously route customers to advertisers without having to publish the advertiser's phone number.
Another classified advertisement system is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,283,731 to Lalonde et al. In this system, a computer database stores details of a number of advertisements. A caller dials the system, keys in an identification number which may be printed in the classified pages of a newspaper, and receives further information about the advertisement.
However, the systems described in these patents application do not alleviate all inconveniences.